When Jeff Bell, a news anchor at KCBS-AM whose booming baritone hits the airwaves every weekday afternoon, started working at the station in 1993, he hid some strange habits from others.
When he raced from the newsroom to cover a breaking news event, he drove the company car for a few blocks, then parked it and caught a taxi. The reason: He feared he would somehow harm others if he drove, although he was a capable driver.
One day while walking in downtown San Francisco eating a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, a portion of it fell to the ground. He spent the next five minutes in the rain hunting for fragments, “so that no one could be hurt by them,” Bell recalled.
During a vacation in Hawaii, he discovered a hub cap was missing from his rental car. That sent Bell into a paroxysm of worry that it fell off while he was driving and that another motorist would end up severely wounded or dead after striking it. The angst ruined the afternoon with his wife and two daughters.
Then he started incessantly washing his hands, to protect others from harmful germs he might be carrying, joining the ranks of what he had previously regarded as nut cases.
At first, Bell had no idea what was ailing him.
While growing up in San Bruno, Bell described a normal childhood and adolescence, aside from a brief bout with obsessive thinking when he was about 7.
At Capuchino High School in Millbrae, Bell was captain of the wrestling team, editor of the high school newspaper, vice president of the student body and senior class valedictorian.
“I’d become your classic adolescent overachiever,” Bell said.
Torrent unleashed
But one day in his late 20s, a minor mishap with his boat at the Oyster Point Marina in South San Francisco unleashed a torrent of worry, which didn’t let up for 1 1/2 years, about that incident.
As he descended into a personal hell of doubt and anxiety, a voice of reason kept telling him his concerns about the boating mishap and other minor or even imagined matters were ludicrous.
But he couldn’t stop the cycle of worry that he had somehow harmed others through his deeds. His mental fixations on the boating incident alone so consumed him that he began to make mistakes as a news writer at KTVU in Oakland, some of which were repeated on air by news anchors. The fixations also kept him awake at night.
After two unhelpful rounds of therapy with psychologists, Bell turned to his journalistic skills to investigate what possessed him.
He found the answer in a thin orange book, which described the lives of people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD. The stories could just as easily have been describing him, Bell said. He also learned it’s typical to show fleeting signs of OCD as a child and then have it return in young adulthood.
His odyssey of recovery began, chronicled in a fascinating new book, “Rewind, Replay, Repeat” (Hazelden), that lays bare the thinking and torment of those suffering from OCD. The book’s release this month publicly ends the years when Bell did all he could to conceal his bizarre actions and thinking.
Few knew
Aside from his wife, Samantha, and a handful of family members, others in his life didn’t suspect anything was wrong until he told them.
“I was surprised,” said Ed Cavagnaro, director of news and programming at KCBS, after Bell described his ordeal and his plans to write a book about it. “Then I started to think about it, and it made a little more sense.”
Cavagnaro said he understood Bell’s move toward anchoring, which kept him inside the studio, rather than doing on-the-street reporting work that exposed him to anxiety-triggering situations.
Kitty O’Neal, who worked as a co-anchor with Bell during his tenure from 1995 to 2000 as afternoon anchor at KFBK-AM in Sacramento, had a similar reaction.
“I remember being very surprised that it would be something as serious as a diagnosed mental problem,” O’Neal said. “But at the same time, I thought, `That kind of explains a few things.'”
O’Neal recalled being puzzled about the way Bell plastered a radio log, which tracks the commercials played during a newscast, with paper clips and detailed notes.
“You don’t need to do any of that,” O’Neal said. “You just check it off.”
Endless conscience
And Bell was always careful to return items to co-workers, like a headset, explaining that he had used them.
“You’d be, `OK, Jeff. Really not that important, but thanks for letting me know,'” O’Neal said.
“Jeff is a very solid, ethical person, he’s honest, he’s very courteous and conscientious,” she said. The way the obsessive-compulsive disorder manifested itself “was through almost exaggerated aspects of those traits.”
With “the genie out of the bottle,” as Bell described it, he’s been gratified at the acceptance he’s found.
“The level of support I’m getting in our newsroom embarrasses me,” Bell said. “My colleagues have gone so far out of their way to make me comfortable.”
But co-workers did have one confession to make after reading his book, he said.
“They’d ask, `I hope this is OK to say this, but this is really funny.'”
It is, he told them.
“Looking at it on paper made it seem all the more ludicrous,” Bell said. But, he added, “It wasn’t funny at the time.”
About 2 percent of Americans suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder during their lifetime, according to Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz, a neuroscientist at the University of California-Los Angeles, whose work Bell credits with significantly aiding his recovery. Schwartz said an additional 15 percent show symptoms of the disorder, but none severe enough to warrant a diagnosis.
Most people with OCD are very good at concealing it, Schwartz said.
“They become adept at hiding their symptoms because they’re extremely aware of the social unacceptability of it,” he said.
Bell made a commitment to come clean about his battle with OCD after one agonizing night in August 1997, when he struggled against an urge to give up his fight and retreat from the world.
“That night I made a bargain with the stars,” he said. “Help me through this and I’ll share my story with anyone who will listen.”
A few years earlier, Bell had started getting treatment, including taking antidepressants, which inhibit the activity of a neurotransmitter called serotonin, and by practicing cognitive behavior therapy, which exposed him to anxiety-provoking situations to desensitize him to their effect.
More help
But Bell, who said he’s “100 percent convinced that the root of this disorder is biochemical,” needed something more.
He found what he was seeking with Schwartz, who works to harness the power of his patients’ minds to change the structure and function of their brains, a phenomenon called “neuroplasticity.” Schwartz believes Bell is a prime example of someone who used “self-directed willpower” to change how his brain worked.
Schwartz describes his strategy in his book, “Brain Lock” (Regan Books), for which he appeared on the national TV circuit, including “Oprah” and the newsmagazine “20/20.”
Schwartz said Bell was an ideal candidate for his treatment for the disease, which is linked to genetics and exacerbated by stress and other external triggers, because Bell was highly motivated.
“I definitely knew he was treatable,” Schwartz said. “He said in the clearest terms, `Whatever I need to do, I’m going to beat this.'”
Since Bell began working with Schwartz, along with a Bay Area cognitive behavior therapist, he’s made remarkable strides.
“The reason Jeff Bell’s book is so important,” Schwartz said, “is not only because it reveals so well what it’s like to suffer from a biomedical/psychiatric illness, but also because it demonstrates so well that you can do something about it.”
Contact Suzanne Bohan at sbohan@angnewspapers.com or (650) 348-4324.
